"Decorative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over which it passes. It is a most remarkable fact that a nation should have existed 2000 years ago capable of originating and completing so great a work; but it is still more remarkable that such a nation, possessing moreover, as it does, a great faculty in decorative art applied to small articles of use and fancy, should be still leading a populous and prosperous existence, and yet should have so little to show in the way of architecture, properly so termed, at the ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... he would have found many things not to his liking; technical defects such as the treatment of grass and foliage in green instead of the proper purple; the tinting of the sky which any landscape painter will tell you would be more decorative done in turquoise green ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... watched her rather too closely, followed all her steps and all her movements a little too perseveringly with my eyes, for she mesmerized me by the grace and alertness of her action—by the deft, cleanly, and even decorative effect resulting from each touch of her slight and fine fingers; and when, at last, she subsided to stillness, the intelligence of her face seemed beauty to me, and I dwelt on it accordingly. Her colour, however, rising, rather than settling with repose, and her eyes remaining downcast, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... long line of famous men, saints, warriors, writers, princes, each with his number after his name, like the kings of the different dynasties. At certain times they had been the real kings of Spain. The Gothic kings in their courts were little more than decorative figureheads that were raised or deposed according to the exigencies of the moment. The nation was a theocratic republic, and its true head ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... illumination we can give no higher praise than that it is beautiful. Not, indeed, because of its deliberate limitations, but in spite of them. For after ages have taught us that if in pure ornament and resplendent decorative completeness the pages of the fourteenth century cannot be surpassed, in miniature historiation it must take a second place. The skilled illuminators of the later schools are the masters of the mere picture. For surely no judge of art could possibly assert that ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... Turf emplacements are constructed for the six guns, and turfed dug-outs house the telephone-operator and the gunners. The battery officers are billeted some way back, usually in a kind of farmhouse, whose chief decorative feature is a midden-heap; in England it would promptly be the subject of a closing order by any ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... portrait, decorative, and scene painting engrossed the art, much to the regret of such critics as Pliny and Vitruvius. Nothing could be in more execrable taste than a colossal painting of Nero, one hundred and twenty feet high. From the time of Augustus, landscape decorations were common, and were carried ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the temple. The next morning, as soon as it was day, he hastened to come into the city and to make every preparation for the funeral. He likewise deputed messengers to proceed ahead to the Temple of the Iron Fence to give, that very night, additional decorative touches to the place where the coffin was to be deposited, and to get ready tea and all the other necessaries, for the use of the persons who would be present at ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... accustomed prudence he set his affairs in order. He had one plan, especially, at heart, that of establishing according to the rules of the Church the chapter which had already existed de facto for a long while. Canons are necessary to a bishopric; their duties are not merely decorative, for they assist the bishop in his episcopal office, form his natural council, replace him on certain occasions, govern the diocese from the death of its head until the deceased is replaced, and finally officiate in turn before the altars ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... almost faultless outline, of a character unconsciously, unaffectedly proclaiming its superior gravity among human masses, he was a planet destined to have many satellites and be satellite to none; an ego of genuine lordliness; a presence at once masterly and decorative. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... the charms of Artemis Lodge, and then slipped to the changes which had come into each of their lives since their last meeting. Margaret Howes confessed to being at work on a large decorative scheme for a woman's club, although she would not divulge the whereabouts of the club nor the length of her stay in the metropolis. Elinor showed the photograph of her finished cartoon for the stained glass window she had been at work on before and during the holidays, while ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... piles of figures in Dravidian temples which, though of small artistic merit, seem to represent the whirl of the world with all its men and monsters, struggling from life into death and back to life again. The reliefs in the great corridors of Angkor are purely decorative. The artist justly felt that so long a stretch of plain stone would be wearisome, and as decoration, his work is successful. Looking outwards the eye is satisfied with such variety as the trees and houses in the temple ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... passed over in like manner from Hellas to Rome, solely in order to be there applied to the enhancement of decorative luxury. Such foreign arts were certainly not new in Rome; the state had from olden time allowed Etruscan flute-players and dancers to appear at its festivals, and the freedmen and the lowest class of the Roman ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... mere stylist. The art of writers who are too consciously that is a sort of decorative representation of life, a formal composition, not a plastic composition. One element particularly characteristic of Jacobsen is his accuracy of observation and minuteness of detail welded with a deep and ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... Camp is growing famously. Six months more and you will be living in your new home. The others—Pete especially—are very much interested in Recreation Hall. They have just worked out a new scheme for parks and gardens. It is very interesting, though purely decorative. It offers many absorbing problems. But, for my own part, I must confess I am more interested in the library. It will be most gratifying to see all our books ranged on shelves, classified and catalogued at last. It is a good little library as amateur libraries go. The others speak ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... remunerative of her brilliant circle. Mr. Spinks (regarded by himself and everybody else as permanent) gave notice and vanished from that hour, carrying with him the hopes of Miss Ada Bishop. Meanwhile Flossie (hitherto regarded from a merely decorative point of view) became a person of considerable importance in the boarding-house. It was not merely that she was an engaged young lady; for, as Miss Bishop pointed out to her with some natural asperity, anybody can be engaged; ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... glow of jewels, that he was always looking at them and always handling them. When painting, accordingly, had reached the point where it was no longer dependent upon the Church, nor even expected to be decorative, but when it was used purely for pleasure, the day could not be far distant when people would expect painting to give them the same enjoyment they received from jewels and glass. In Bassano's works this taste found full satisfaction. ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... institutions have their ridiculous sides, which astonish and amuse us when pointed out, but from viewing which we suddenly become aware of relative values before misunderstood. But just as poetry may degenerate into a musical collection of words and painting into a decorative association of colors, so humor may degenerate into the merely comic or amusing. The laugh which true humor arouses is not far removed from tears. Humor indeed is not always associated with kindliness, for we have the sardonic humor of Carlyle and the savage humor of Swift; but it is naturally ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... curious thing about some of the decorative work on the exterior of the Palace. An episcopal diary started by Bishop Longley, and preserved at the Palace, mentions that amongst many carved "heads" on the chapel was that of a Bishop. A strong gust of wind blew it down: all the others, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the cashier, a decorative blonde, he put a cent in the machine which good-naturedly drops out boxes of matches. No box dropped this time, though ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... shell ornaments have been noted in the archaeology of Baja California. No specimens identical to those from Bahia de Los Angeles are known; however, all of the decorative elements and techniques recorded here can be duplicated among specimens of oyster (Pinctada mazatlanica) shell ornaments from the Cape Region far to the south (Massey, MS 1). Since abalone do not occur in the Gulf of California, these shells must have been ...
— A Burial Cave in Baja California - The Palmer Collection, 1887 • William C. Massey
... curving back toward the shaft, and on the other a point. To keep the weapon from slipping out of the hand, a stud is left in the hard wood shaft, about two-thirds of the way from the head, the shaft itself being protected by a steel sheathing half way down; the remainder being ornamented with decorative brass plates and strips, and the end shod in a ferrule of silver. The top of the ax is not straight, but curved, both edge and point taking, as it were, their origin in this curve; the edge is formed by a double chamfer, the ax-blade being of uniform thickness. All together, this ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... City, Minnesota. Lived in New York City since early childhood. Privately educated. Chief interests: decorative art, gardening, people. First published story: "Burned Hands," Harper's Bazar, Nov., 1918. Lives ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... kept, at every moment of her life, every advantage—it made her beautifully soft, very nearly generous; so she didn't distinguish the little protuberant eyes of smaller social insects, often endowed with such a range, from the other decorative spots on their bodies and wings. Maggie had liked, in London, and in the world at large, so many more people than she had thought it right to fear, right even to so much as judge, that it positively quickened her fever to have to recognise, in this case, such a lapse ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... illustration of the engine, in chapter two, the non-human thing is a personality, even if it is not beautiful. When it takes on the ritual of decorative design, this new vitality is made seductive, and when it is an object of nature, this seductive ritual becomes a new pantheism. The armies upon the mountains they are defending are rooted in the soil like trees. They resist ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... at school. She came daintily up the aisle, two cheap bangles on one wrist slipping over a slim hand, and tinkling. Floretta's mother had a taste for the cheaply decorative. There was an abundance of coarse lace on Floretta's frock, and she wore a superfluous sash which was not too fresh. Floretta toed out excessively, her slender little feet pointing out sharply, almost at right angles with each other, and Ellen admired ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... artistic character of the great composers by a due weighing of their individual attributes against the controlling influences of their time. It is hardly necessary to add that in his reflections music was never detached from its generic connection with the fine arts, inclusive of industrial, decorative, and domestic art. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... niches, containing sitting statues, and three recesses richly ornamented with the representation in strong relief of a Roman triumph. Upon the basement also were various sculptures in honor of the Emperor Trajan. These, and, indeed, all the decorative sculpture, &c., profusely lavished upon this building have suffered greatly. The two remaining statues are much dilapidated. From this point a magnificent view of the Acropolis is obtained, and few are the sights presented to the traveller, which surpass in historic ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... and industries of the cities and countries through which they pass. A description is given of the native sports of boys in each of the foreign countries through which they travel. The books are illustrated by decorative head and end pieces for each chapter, there being 36 original drawings in each book, all by the author, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... King's Academy, Augustin Rousseau. To M. des Amis, whose swordsmanship was all based on practice and not at all on theory, who was indeed no theorist or student in any sense, that little library was merely a suitable adjunct to a fencing-academy, a proper piece of decorative furniture. The books themselves meant nothing to him in any other sense. He had not the type of mind that could have read them with profit nor could he understand that another should do so. Andre-Louis, on the ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... others lie close to human emotion; are indeed interpenetrated with emotion; whereas 'Autumn' makes but an objective appeal, chiefly to the visual sense. It is, as I have said, a decorative picture; and even so it hardly beats the pictures in stanza 4 of ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... some other colored plush, with fringed and embroidered ends, laid the entire length down through the center of the table. This affords a charming contrast to the snowy napery, and sets the keynote of color for the floral decorations. The center decorative pieces are now no longer high, thus rendering a glimpse of the person opposite almost impossible, but are low ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... designed, and six full-page illustrations by Howard Chandler Christy, serve to give the distinguishing decorative embellishments that this first book by Mr. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... waters. But I will give you a fuller account some day. The book is a very pretty one in more than one sense. The decorative harp, perhaps, too ostentatious; a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... is full of him—for indeed all the decorative work seems to be his—is one of the first buildings of the Renaissance, the beautiful work of Filippo Brunelleschi. Covered by a polygonal dome, the altar itself stands under another dome, low and small; and everywhere Donatello ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... period decorative paintings, religious paintings and ancestral paintings made after death, were executed in China by artisans, ordinary workmen at the service of whosoever might engage them. Such work should not be consulted in studying ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... to an author, I am strongly of opinion that something will happen before long. And if the worst comes to the worst, there is always that story of my First Love wherewith to fill the time. Meanwhile I am approaching a decorative old Surrey town, little more than a cluster of ripe old inns, to one of which I have much pleasure in inviting ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... and looked back at them. Brought from Verona generations ago, they were a perfect example of a perfect period. Richly decorative, various in design, light and flowing in form, the delicate curves broke into actual leafage, sweeping and free as nature's own. The Ffolliots were proud ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... slosh was soon trodden into water, which ran off in the gutters. The flags, which had clung to the staffs, began to dry and flutter in the breeze. Nearly every house was decked with bunting, while upon many the most artistic designs of decorative art were displayed. Upon the broad sidewalks of Pennsylvania Avenue a living tide of humanity—men, women, and children—flowed toward the Capitol, pausing now and then to gaze at some ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... inconsolable, and immediately started out after a new wife, and has had one up on a visit, but says she has "no conversation"; and I think he will take back the erring and possibly repentant candlestick; whom we all devoutly prefer, as she is not only highly decorative, but good-natured, and if she does little work makes no rows. I tell this lightly, but it really was a heavy business; many were accused of complicity, and Rafael was really very sorry. I had to hold beds of justice—literally—seated in my bed and surrounded by lying Samoans seated on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of this building so clearly expresses its purpose that a definition of style promptly suggests the title of Horticultural Architecture. Its decorative spire-like finials resemble the cypress and poplar. The clusters of floral ornaments and festoons reflect one of the fundamental purposes of decorative glory to which all plant life has been decreed. The bulblike glass dome is like an enormous dewdrop ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... has a happy household. A master decorative workman, only lacking a touch of genius to be a sculptor, his pride is in his artistic handiwork. His happiness in his good wife Josephine. His heart centres ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... Variations in punctuation and capitalization Decorative features of final letters, especially -ll printed with connecting line Font changes such as boldface instead of small capitals Prices are printed inline as ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... same Wahuma features as Kamrasi, whom they also resemble both in general physical appearance, and in many of them having circular marks, as if made by cautery, on the forehead and temples. These marks I took not to be tatooing or decorative, but as a cure for disease—cautery being a favourite remedy ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... himself in the monkish Latin and medieval romances which later gave his work so naive and remote a quality. That was the beginning of the wattle fences, the cobble pave, the brown roof beams, the cunningly wrought fabrics that gave to his pictures such a richness of decorative effect. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Haydon's biographer points out, 'the consummation of what he had so earnestly fought for, a competition of native artists to prove their capability for executing great monumental and decorative works; but with this came his own bitter disappointment at not being among the successful competitors. In all his struggles up to this point, Haydon had the consolation of hope that better times were coming. But now the good time for art was at hand, and ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... In decorative and especially in ceramic art, as early as the fourth and fifth dynasties, we have vases, cups, and other vessels showing exquisite beauty of outline and a general sense of form almost if not quite equal to Etruscan and Grecian work of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... to beautify the little home; and even stern old Aunt Clay unbent to the extent of lending her gardener to do the work. She had also donated a clump of Adam's and Eve's needles and threads that proved very decorative, but quite as ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... pictures. And their new art develops at the expense of decoration; it becomes perfect and sterile. What is commonly called decay is merely stylistic development. The exquisite art of Byzantium was wrongly considered as the debasement of Greco-Roman art. It was really the decorative expansion of it; the conventionalising of exaggerated realism. The same might have happened in Europe after the Baroque and Rococo fashions had their day; politics and commerce interfered. The intensely artificial painting ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... ancient sculpture. The first room shown, the Sala degli Scarlatti, is the bedroom of the Doges, with a massive and rather fine chimney piece and an ornate ceiling. The next room, the Sala dello Scudo, has a fine decorative, if inaccurate, map of the world, made by a monk in the fifteenth century. The next, the Sala Grimani, has rival lions of S. Mark by Jacobello del Fiore, an early Venetian painter, in 1415, and Carpaccio a century later. Jacopo's lion has a very ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... first volume, I carefully kept the study of expression distinct from that of abstract architectural perfection; telling the reader that in every building we should afterwards examine, he would have first to form a judgment of its construction and decorative merit, considering it merely as a work of art; and then to examine farther, in what degree it fulfilled its expressional purposes. Accordingly, we have first to judge of St. Mark's merely as a piece of architecture, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... beneath the carriage-road of the Park. Above, the archway is a pediment, supported by two neat columns, and a terraced walk, with balustrades. The whole is handsomely executed in cement or imitative stone. The decorative vases are by Austin, of the New Road. A lion's head, in bold relief, forms an appropriate key-stone embellishment to the arch. The sloping banks are formed of mimic rock-work profusely intermingled with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... had drawing-rooms swarming with every unnecessary of life; they had the spacious and lofty hall with armor and swords and spears and shields, "all useful," as an auctioneer would say—"all useful, gentlemen, for decorative purposes"—with trophies of the chase in its milder home forms and as carried on in African or Bengal jungles; they had a library filled from floor to ceiling with books containing, it is to be presumed, the life-blood of master spirits, but they did not often ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... Brooke died at the old mansion opposite the Roman town of Reculver in Kent. The house is still known as Brooke-farm; and the original gateway of decorative brickwork still exists. He was buried in Reculver Church, now destroyed, where a mural monument was erected to his memory, having a rhyming inscription, which told ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... picture in our mind's eye the stage and person of the European or American conjuror. A few small tables with spindle legs (upon them a steel frame or so, transparent and decorative) are exposed to our view. The performer appears with rolled up sleeves in close fitting clothes and by the end of his performance has filled the stage with several large flags, a bouquet of flowers and, may be, a beautiful lady, all, possibly produced ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... Luxembourg, "The Death of Socrates," "Sappho," "Dante at Ravenna," "The Fairy of the Pearls," "The Sirens," "The Triumph of Venus," and "Camille Desmoulins at the Palais Royal," in addition to a number of important decorative works. The "Death of Chopin" was exhibited in 1885. A gold medal was bestowed upon Barrias at the Paris Exposition of 1889, when the artist was in his sixty-seventh year. The critic, Roger Ballu, said of him: "A painter of style, very careful ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... the noise both of the street and the household, which he had set apart and prepared for her when she was coming, stepping down a little from her own level to be his wife. It was dismantled, he knew; her books were gone, and all the costly decorative fittings he had chosen with so much joyous anxiety. But the panelled doors which he had worked at with his own hands were there, and the window, with its delicately tinted lattice-frames, through which the sun had shone in ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... natural touch. The dramatic feeling here and there is considerable. The scene of the guards watching the imprisoned Saint through the window and seeing the shadow of two heads, as the Saviour visits him, imparts a distinct emotion; and there is force as well as feeling for decorative composition in the panel in which the Saint's body lies at the feet of the sailors, while his vision appears shining ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... "These are just a few of the best. I have many others which I should like you to see some time. I always leave the enlarging to keep me alive during the winter months. These are a few odd ones I enlarged for decorative purposes." ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... for Pope Julius. Raffaello had painted both of those chambers; but it became necessary to repaint all the base to the scenes in the Chamber of the Segnatura, which is that in which is the picture of Mount Parnassus. On which account a decorative design in imitation of marble was painted by Perino, with various terminal figures, festoons, masks, and other ornaments; and, in certain spaces, scenes painted to look like bronze, which are very beautiful for works in fresco. In these scenes, even as ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... I have absolute proof that he is entirely mistaken. For Otterburne I am equally fortunate; that is, I can show that Scott's part went no further than "the making of a standard text" on his avowed principles. For Jamie Telfer, having no original manuscript, I admit DECORATIVE interpolations, and for the rest, argue on internal evidence, no other being accessible. For Kinmont Willie, I confess that the poem, as it stands, is Scott's, but give reasons for thinking that he had ballad fragments in his mind, if not ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... concomitant of youth, a naive effervescence with which thought and brooding had to part? And, turning the page of his book, he noticed that he could no longer see to read, the lamp had grown too dim, and showed but a decorative glow in the bright moonlight flooding through the study window. He got up and put another log on the fire, for these last ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... please let us see your lovely butterflies! Aren't they just too perfectly sweet for anything! I wonder why they don't trim hats with butterflies? Do you know all their names, you awfully clever man? Do they know their names, too, Mr. Flint? Butterflies must be so very interesting! And so decorative, particularly on china and house linen! How you have the heart to kill them, I can't imagine. Just think of taking the poor mother-butterflies away from the dear little baby-ones!' ...—and me having to stand ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... ugly, like de Vignolles. On the contrary, he was, as men go, distinctly good looking; he knew he was; the glances of the beautiful and hypothetical stranger assured him of it, and he had looked in the glass not half an hour ago to reassure himself. Solid he was, and well built, and he had decorative points that pleased: a fresh color, eyes that flashed blue round a throbbing black, a crisp tawny curl in his short moustache and shorter hair. He was well off; there wasn't a thing she wanted that he couldn't give her. ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... that the two published volumes of it were printed. The library forms part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing of the castle. The first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms are arranged, in a decorative way, covering the ceiling and the walls with strange patterns. The second room contains pottery, collected by Casanova's Waldstein on his Eastern travels. The third room is full of curious mechanical toys, and cabinets, and carvings in ivory. Finally, we come to the library, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the Boro Budur, and must confess that from none of them did we get a correct idea of what we were to see. It must be seen to be realised. Not even photographs give a true conception of the ornate character of the decorative stonework—the hard but freely-worked lava stone having lent itself easily to the chisel. Like Cologne or Milan Cathedrals, it must be examined minutely to grasp the elaborateness of the sculptured work, but, unlike either ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... dine chez Froment [the artist who paints such beautiful decorative works for Sevres]; ce matin j'ai dejeune chez Froment, ce soir j'y dine, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... English sets can be made up in a style not distinguishable from the original, as one may easily see by calling on our worthy next neighbor, Briggs, who holds the opposite corner to our 'Atlantic Monthly.' No porcelain, it is true, is yet made in America, these decorative arts being exercised on articles imported from Europe. Our tables must, therefore, perforce, be largely indebted to foreign lands for years to come. Exclusive of this item, however, I believe it would require very little self-denial to paper, carpet, and furnish a house entirely from the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and the allegorical design enjoyed perhaps his equal favour. He believed in both with an energy of faith that was capable of moving mountains. And we have to remark in him, not the parts where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely decorative invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be credulity, and his characters become so real to him that he forgets the end of their creation. We can follow him step by step into the trap which he lays for himself by his own entire good ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shafts, as in the cloisters of Monreale near Palermo, those of St Paul outside Rome, and many churches in Germany. Its earliest appearance was in the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, where the shafts flanking the entrance doorway have nine decorative chevron bands; in this case there is no doubt it was derived from the metal casing of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... original, made, probably at the order of Nero, for one of the baths of the imperial villa at Antium, in whose ruins it was found in the fifteenth century. From the time of the Romans, the white marble of the Montes Lunenses has been used for decorative purposes in many of the churches and public buildings of Italy. It formed the material out of which Michael Angelo, Canova, and Thorwaldsen chiselled their immortal works. Its quality and composition, however, vary very considerably, and small ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... purpose in the scheme of things. One can dine openly with them at the most exclusive restaurant, and not mind meeting one's relations. They are rather more expensive than the others—pearl necklaces—sables—essence for their motor cars—these are their prices.—They are so decorative, too, and before the war were such excellent tango partners. These three are all of the best families, and their relations stick to them in the background, so they are not altogether declasse. Maurice says they are the most agreeable women in ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... bountiful charity for the welfare of his soul. We ought rather to ascribe them to some constitutional peculiarity, affecting his whole temperament, and tinging his experience with despondency and gloom. An absolute insensibility to merely decorative details, to the loveliness of jewels, stuffs, and natural objects, to flowers and trees and pleasant landscapes, to everything, in short, which delighted the Italians of that period, is a main characteristic ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... principles, and human figures were represented altogether in accordance with established conventions. Greek sculpture, on the contrary, even in its primitive forms was eminently natural, capable of developing a high degree of realism. From the first it was decorative in character, and this left the artist free to execute in his own way, provided only that the result should be in accordance with the highest type of beauty which he could conceive. An example of this early decorative art ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... they enjoy themselves to the full. They have cheated France, they are dividing the spoil. France is a bag, and they put their hand in it. Rummage, for Heaven's sake! Take, while you are there; help yourselves, draw out, plunder, steal! One wants money, another wants situations, another wants a decorative collar round his neck, another a plume in his hat, another embroidery on his sleeve, another women, another power; another news for the Bourse, another a railway, another wine. I should think, indeed, that they are well satisfied. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... ceiling, its tall windows, its Prussian-blue wall-paper behind the old cabinets and faded pictures, and the chair covers in Turkey-red twill against the blue, which still remained to bear witness at once to the domestic economies and the decorative ideas of old Robert Boyce—conscious also of the figures on either side of her, and of her own quick-beating youth betwixt them. She was sore and unhappy; yet, on the whole, what she was thinking most about was Aldous Raeburn. What had he said to Lord Maxwell?—and to the Winterbournes? She wished ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Harvester. "I only see and recognize studies; I can't materialize them, and until they are drawn, no one can profit by them. In this partnership we revolutionize decorative art. There are actually birds besides fat robins and nondescript swallows. The crane and heron do not monopolize the water. Wild rose and golden-rod are not the only flowers. The other day I was gathering lobelia. The seeds are used in tonic preparations. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... years and more of marriage, they were very good friends; or, why not say, old acquaintances? There are two kinds of crystallisation in love affairs, with all respect to M. de Stendhal. One kind hardens the surfaces without any decorative effect. There are no facets visible, no angles to catch the light. In the case of the Macartney marriage I suspect this to have been the only kind—a kind of callosity, protective and numbing. The less they were thrown together, she found, the better friends they were. At home they were really ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... increased and the resources of the country must be so developed as to enable it to pay its way without sinking into hopeless stagnation. It was a disappointment to some to see Cavour devoting himself with more ardour to putting on new taxes than to producing any of those decorative schemes for hastening the millennium which are expected from a new and ambitious minister. But, though ambitious, he cared for the substance, power—not for the ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... he meditated. Therefore he not only made a treaty with Hiram, King of Tyre, for supplies of material, but of workmen, and chief of these, one whose artistic productions were to be the best adornments of the House of God for succeeding centuries. He was a tried veteran in decorative work, an expert in almost every kind of art, and fit to be placed in the position of chief superintendent of so superb a building. The King of Tyre sent to Solomon a testimony which was eloquent in ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... she must obey the invitation, though it disturbed her greatly; but she was a cautious woman, with not only her heart but her brains and tongue in the right place, and she at once made up her mind what must be done under the circumstances. While she gave a few decorative touches to her person she handed the tablet to the waiting-woman, whom she had taken into her own room, and desired her to carry it at once to her husband, and tell him whither she had gone, and to beg him to return without delay to take care of Dada. But ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... architects who had invented a Catalan art with pointed arches, battlements, and ducal coronets. These medieval coronets, which were repeated even on the peaks of the chimney pots, were the everlasting decorative motif of an industrial city little given to ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Hippodrome, where we met many old acquaintances. My own Artillery Twins were there, and kissed their hands to me as they flew gracefully over our heads towards the desired trapeze. Here, also, was the Tattooed Man, and I grasped his variegated and decorative hand with an emotion I have rarely felt. Without vanity I may say that Philippa and my mother had ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... to realize what a rambling and craggy sort of place this was. And how decorative! Almost operatic. The town was full of surprises—of unexpected glimpses upon a group of slender palms, some gleaming precipice, or the distant sea. Gardens appeared to be toppling over the houses; green ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... gold-work stands absolutely alone,—the result of an artistic instinct deeper than any rules or any instruction, and therefore not to be improved or repeated. It is characterized by the most subtile and lovely use of decorative masses and lines,—not for representation or imitation, which are not motives to enter into pure ornament, but for the highest effect of beautiful form and rich color, without giving the eye or mind any associative or intellectual suggestion. The vice of all modern ornamentation is, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... spirals all over the remainder of the gold (Fig. 9). Another corpse had a plain gold breastplate with the nipples indicated. [Footnote: Schuchardt, Schliemann's Excavations, pp. 254-257, fig. 256.] These decorative corslets of gold were probably funereal symbols of practicable breastplates of bronze, but no such pieces of armour are worn by the fighting-men on the gems and other works of art of Mycenae, and none are found in Mycenaean ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... running up too far (Fig. 195). Allow eight or ten inches of string above the bell, so that it may be hung high or low, as desired. A bell should never be tied close to a branch, but should hang down far enough to sway with every passing current of air. The long string also adds to the decorative effect. ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard
... shape of springs, on the impervious stratum. For the most part the villages lie along the hillsides, surrounded by trees, embellished by chateaux and parks. They are well-built and attractive, boasting churches of graceful architecture, thanks to the lovely decorative stone taken from the quarries in the limestone cliffs above, which are called boves, or croutes. A fascinating, fertile country, diversified and pleasant to the eye, before the war it might well have been taken as a sample ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... 2, 3) show the decorative use of ivory studs. On the soundboard appears the Latin inscription Vita brevis, ars longa. A laminated parchment rose, 3-3/16" in diameter, is placed in the soundboard in the position indicated ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge
... extravagant period of spectacular drama, which gave to the stage such memorable pictures as "Du Barry," with Mrs. Carter, and "The Darling of the Gods," with Blanche Bates. In such pieces he literally threw away the possibilities of profit, in order to gratify his decorative sense. Out of that time came two distinctive pieces—one, the exquisitely poignant "Madame Butterfly" and the other, "The Girl of the Golden West"— both giving inspiration to the composer, Puccini, who discovered that a Belasco ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... be said that in pictorial and other arts there are some designs that are purely decorative and apparently have no living and inner ideal to express. But this cannot be true. These decorations carry the emotional motive of the artist, which says: "I find joy in my creation; it is good." All the language of joy is beauty. It is necessary to note, however, that ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... and the plastic arts. The emphasis is put upon exquisiteness in decoration, upon precision in technique, upon loveliness of material. The Pre-Raphaelite movement in poetry, with its emphasis on the use of picturesque and decorative epithets, the exclusive emphasis in some modern music on subtlety of technique in tone and color, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Wood Berries May be Preserved.—Almost any kind of bright wood berries may be preserved for decorative use in the winter, by dipping in melted paraffin and putting away in a cool place until needed. Treated in this way berries will remain firm and bright for a long time, and may be ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... you try to get three skins off one ox. Excuse me, I speak disconnectedly, but that doesn't matter. You don't look upon the simple people as human beings. And even the princes, counts, and bishops who used to come and see you, you looked upon simply as decorative figures, not as living beings. But the worst of all, the thing that most revolts me, is having a fortune of over a million and doing ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Bubi wears pieces of wood stuck through the lobe of the ear, and although this is not a decorative habit still it is less undecorative than that of certain mainland friends of mine in this region, who wear large and necessarily dripping lumps of fat in their ears and in their hair. His neck is hung round with ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage floats high in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and blackbirds, who fill the late, decorative sunshine with a shimmer of golden sound. There the nightingale finds her green cloister; and on those branches sometimes, like a great fruit, hangs the lemon-coloured Moon. In the glare of August, when ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... hats loitered in the white flare of drugstore lights. Here and there a brown stoop bloomed with a boarder or two. In front of Seligman's florist shop, which occupied the ground floor of Madam Moores's dressmaking establishment, Alphonse Michelson paused for a moment in the flare of its decorative show-window and flecked at his hatband ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... know) to be a sort of music made visible. That idle singer, one might fancy, by an art beyond art, had attracted beams and stones into their fit places. And there, sure enough, he still sits, as a final decorative touch, by way of apex on the gable which looks northward, though much weather-worn, and with an ugly gap between the shoulder and the fingers on the harp,* as if, literally, he had cut off his right hand and put it from him:—King ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... 1900 A.D.—nearly 7,000 years. Of all the millions of chairs made during the centuries, each one can be classified under one or more of the 40 general styles shown in the chart. This chart was compiled by the editor of Decorative Furniture. The Colonial does not appear on the chart because it classifies under the Jacobean and other styles. A condensed key ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor
... Angelo. Donatello's aptitude for architectural setting is also illustrated by the choristers' galleries in the Cathedral and San Lorenzo. The former must be dealt with in detail when considering Donatello's treatment of childhood. As an architectural work it shows how the sculptor employed decorative adjuncts such as mosaic and majolica[81] to set off the white marble; he also added deep maroon slabs of porphyry and bronze heads, thus combining various arts and materials. Having no sculpture, the Cantoria of San ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... by a man, who, according to his ideas of fitness, should have come to them cap in hand; and as a natural consequence, the story, no doubt exaggerated when it reached him, loses nothing under his transforming and malicious pen. Stripped of its decorative flippancy, however, there remains but little that can really be regarded as "humiliating." Scott himself suggests, what is most unquestionably the case, that the blind man was the novelist's half-brother, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Regardless of seasons and climates he forced trees of diverse essences into life, and flowers with conflicting fragrances and colors. By the clash of these tones he created a general, nondescript, unexpected, strange perfume in which reappeared, like an obstinate refrain, the decorative phrase of the beginning, the odor of the meadows fanned by the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... above them other shelves with row after row of jars. Near the stove, more shelves with more and more jars, with phials, kettles, pannikins, and pipkins. Everywhere else shelves of medicine bottles, innumerable medicine bottles of all sorts and sizes, giving to the honey-colored walls a decorative glimmer of sea-blue ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... the neighboring house and help themselves to the beautiful lilies which bloom in old Wieland's garden. In these stories the historical personages, which with artistic discretion are kept in the background, constitute after all only a decorative element; in the foreground happy youthfulness disports itself in its irresponsibility. "O you poor young folks of today," exclaims the young Weimar authoress, "if you had any idea what riches, what abundance ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Book," she said. Her own copy was bound in purple velvet, gilt-edged, as decorative ladies like to have holier books, and she carried it about with her, and quoted it, and (Adrian remarked to Mrs. Doria) hunted a noble quarry, and deliberately aimed at him therewith, which Mrs. Doria chose to believe, and regretted her brother would ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... herself had been more admirable in every way than this polished woman who had succeeded her: the woman who was everything that little girl had yearned to be and who stood self-revealed as brilliant and hard as one of her own purely decorative diamonds. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... himself of them with a brusque gesture and cast a glance over the large decorative canvases of the rotunda, that recalled the wars of the 17th century; generals with bristling mustaches and plumed slouch-hat, directing the battle with a short baton, as though they were directing an orchestra, troops of arquebusiers disappearing downhill ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... has been alleged to be peculiar to man. In refutation of this assertion Darwin points to the decorative colours of birds, which are used for display. And to the last objection, that man alone has religion, that he alone has a belief in God, it is answered "that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... think he has all he can do keeping up with the beauty shop. You see, it is more than a massage parlour. They do real decorative surgery, as it is called. They'll engage to give you a new skin as soft and pink as a baby's. Or they will straighten a nose, or turn an ear. They have light treatment for complexions—the ruby ray, the violet ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... two decorative objects and half shadowed by the bright-green fronds of a large artificial palm, sat AEsop Loving, son-in-law of the senior partner. From his parent-by-marriage AEsop had borrowed desk-room for the carrying on of the multitudinous business relating to the general management of one of ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... successful building dating from the sixteenth century: first the residence of the Chancellors, recently a prison, and now the Record Office of Friesland. Not until the Middelburg stadhuis shall we see anything more cheerfully gay and decorative. The little Weigh House is in its own way very charming. But for gravity one must go to the Oldehof, a sombre tower on the ramparts of the city. Once the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... period. They were chiefly employed for entertainments, and the banquets of the wealthy. They are seen in use in scenes painted on the vases themselves. Many, especially those of the later style, were solely used for decorative purposes, as is evident from the fact of one side only being executed with care, while the other has been neglected, both in the drawing and in the subject. Those with Panathenaic subjects were probably given full of oil, as prizes at the national games. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden and farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within. The old Roman architects seem to have well understood the decorative value of the floor—the real economy there was, in the production of rich interior effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface they trod on. The pavement of the hall had lost something ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... French Romantic School, and his interest is in the science of love; not in ancient rude and passionate stories, such as the story of Tristram—for it is rude and ancient, even in the French of Thomas—not in the "Celtic magic," except for decorative and incidental purposes, but in psychology and analysis of the emotions, and in the appropriate forms of language for ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... always to be remembered in looking at any engravings from the works of Giotto; for the injury they sustain in being deprived of their colour is far greater than in the case of later designers. All works produced in the fourteenth century agree in being more or less decorative; they were intended in most instances to be subservient to architectural effect, and were executed in the manner best calculated to produce a striking impression when they were seen in a mass. The painted wall and the painted window were part and parcel of one magnificent ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... in the morning, not yet shaved, standing at the bar, his hat on one side, his mouth spreading in that abandonment to laughter which has become from the necessity of his profession, a natural trick; oh, much more, I think, than if we merely come upon an always decorative, never an obtrusive, costumed figure, leaning against the wall, nonchalantly enough, in a corner ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... great house, however, in the soft light of evening, he was conscious of no violence done to his artistic sense. It was a big building, severely simple in design, yet with the rich grace, spacious solidity, and decorative relief of an Italian palace: compact, generous, traditionally genuine and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... beginning to acquire consciousness, and sorely afflicted by the decorative scheme that had been adopted in Barty's bedroom, found solace in the faces of these two women. Even the lazy consideration of the contrast between their types, was a comfort to Larry, and distracted his mind from the wall-paper (which ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... was just about to say that it is the cleverest thing in the Exhibition—from an artistic point of view. No special interest in it, but the scheme of colour very harmonious—and very decorative. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... school I had to face the usual ordeal of having to "write" as best I could a motto for use as a wall picture. Our lettering, when done with a brush, falls pitifully behind Chinese characters in decorative value, and our mottoes will not readily translate into Japanese. I was often grateful to Henley for "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul," because with the substitution of "commander" for captain, the ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... of the same about their straw hats, often adding braids of laurel leaves across the shoulders and chest. The white blossoms of the jasmine, fragrant as tuberoses, which they much resemble, are generally employed for this decorative purpose. As a people the Hawaiians are very courteous and respectful, rarely failing to greet all passing strangers with a softly articulated "alo-ha," which signifies "my ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... decidedly "of the period" are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods. They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the AEsthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism in art, (6) John Masefield and the return of the rhymed narrative, ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... quantitative measures of classical poetry; Spenser had a love affair in Yorkshire and wrote poetry about it, letting just enough be known to stimulate the imagination of the public. They tried their hands at everything, imitated everything, and in all were brilliant, sparkling, and decorative; they got a kind of entrance to the circle of the Court. Then Spenser published his Shepherd's Calendar, a series of pastoral eclogues for every month of the year, after a manner taken from French and Italian ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... as in Nellie's regime, continued to wear the common gray percales, and to eat off the common white crockery. And with a strange, bewitched pertinacity, the fine, decorative bits of china, shut away on their upper shelf in the safe continued to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... bridegroom places the rice on the bride's head and she lays the juari at his feet. A dish full of water with a golden ring in it is put between them, and they lay their hands on the ring together under the water and walk five times round a decorative little marriage-shed erected inside the real one. A feast is given, and the bridal couple sit on a little dais and eat out of the same dish. The remarriage of widows is permitted, but the widow may not marry a man belonging to the section ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... just what sort of milestones I'd like to leave. Only decorative ones, of course. I wish to keep my lane free from weeds and ugly, jagged ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... and break a thousand fortunes in a day. He answered Evesham carelessly, with his gaze still on Mary, and in a voice too low for my straining ears. There was some woman in the group also, but she has left nothing upon my mind whatever except an effect of black and a very decorative green sunshade. She greeted Justin's remark, I remember, with the little yelp of laughter that characterized that set. I think too there was someone else in the group; but I cannot clearly ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... their great ornamental helms.[161] The basnet itself was perfectly plain. About the end of the 16th century the usual English helmets were the burgonet and morion.[162] These were often very decorative, as may be seen by a visit to any collection of old armour. Spenser speaks of a "guilt engraven morion" (Faerie Queene, vii. 7). Between the basnet and these reigned the salet or salade, on which Jack ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... antiquarian relics, chiefly in the decorative branch of art, preserved in the northern counties, pourtrayed by a very competent hand.... All are drawn with that distinctness which makes them available for the antiquarian, for the artist who is studying costume, and for the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... Part I. of THE DECORATIVE ARTS of the MIDDLE AGES. By HENRY SHAW, F.S.A. The object of the present publication is to exhibit, by means of a series of carefully executed Engravings (taken from some of the best authorities now remaining) the peculiar features, and general characteristics of Decorative ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.19 • Various
... very important distinction between what is beautiful and what is merely pleasing because of its being useful and agreeable, we see at once that the words "decorative," "ornamental," "attractive," "handsome," etc., are constantly used by writers on this subject in a misleading and question-begging way. We can hardly blame a man like Barrington for writing (11) that among the natives of Botany Bay "scars are, by both sexes, deemed highly ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... night I was some chilly in the ankles. I'd called for J. Bayard at his hotel, and he'd shown up with the Major. No figment of the imagination, either, the Major. He's a big, husky, rich-colored party that's some imposin' and decorative in open-faced togs; quiet and shy actin', though, just as Steele had said. I sort of took to him, ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... recognised as belonging to the humorist; they consisted not a little in that healthy hatred of the affectation with which so much good art is husked. In more recent times Punch did not ignore the fine decorative qualities of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's art, though he plainly loathed the morbid ugliness of much of ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Vavasour, for instance, supplied stone; that of Percy gave wood to be used in building the great metropolitical church. If the money cost was enormous, the completed building, for design, engineering, and decorative work—in stone, wood, cloth, stained glass—was far ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... not disparage delicate and fragile flowerets, though I am so infatuated by their brilliant sisters. They are lovely to examine, and, as individuals, very precious, but in my opinion useless for decorative purposes. In a body they confuse one another, and you ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the lights of lofty candelabras, while the marble staircase unfurled, as it were, a delicately chiseled balustrade. Then, too, the drawing room looked splendid; it was hung with Genoa velvet, and a huge decorative design by Boucher covered the ceiling, a design for which the architect had paid a hundred thousand francs at the sale of the Chateau de Dampierre. The lusters and the crystal ornaments lit up a luxurious display of mirrors and precious furniture. ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... of lead and potash, and baked the third time in a small furnace at a low temperature. The coloring oxides in use are those of copper, cobalt, iron, antimony, manganese, and gold. Japanese porcelain painting may be divided into two categories, decorative and graphic; the first is used to improve the vessel upon which it is placed, and this class includes all the ware except that of the province of Kaga, which would come under the head of graphic, as it delineates ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... composers, the singing teachers in Italy consented to adapt their method to the universal clamor for decorative, florid singing. The audiences did not seem to care at all what was sung to them, as long as it was sung with sensuous beauty of tone, and facility of execution; consequently sensuous beauty of tone and facility of execution were almost the ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... market, but for the daily use of the people, such as drinking-vessels—lota is the pretty name—and big brass plates out of which they eat their rice and dhalbat. They keep them beautifully polished with sand, and I think they ought to be rather decorative; much more attractive certainly than the candlesticks and pots and cheap rough silver-work which is the usual loot carried ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... either side of the throne wore, like its occupant, robes of red, lined with ermine. The rank behind wore shorter robes, less decorative, but no less extraordinary. They might all have stepped out of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... Mrs. Stetson were in conference with her in her office and a bit later the servants, some thirty or forty of them, were assembled in their dining-room and assigned various duties, all of which were performed under the supervising eye of Mrs. Wellington, her daughter, or Sara Van Valkenberg. No decorative specialist, or other alien appendage to social functions on a large scale, was in attendance, and, save for the caterer's men, who arranged a hundred odd small tables on the verandas, and the electricians, who hung chandeliers at intervals ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... ditto mounted on bronze, common and heavy in design,—Roman standards with Greek foliage! Above the clock is that inevitable good-natured lion which looks at you with a simper, the lion of ornamentation, with a big ball under his feet, symbol of the decorative lion, who passes his life holding a black ball, —exactly like a deputy of the Left. Perhaps it is meant as a constitutional myth. The face of the clock is curious. The glass over the chimney is framed in that new fashion of applied mouldings which is so trumpery and vulgar. From the ceiling ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... office and bit our thumbs all day; the thousands stopped at home. We had ample opportunities for making studies of the decorative detail on the Campanile, till we knew every square inch of it better than Mr. Ruskin. Elsie's notebook contains, I believe, eleven hundred separate sketches of the Campanile, from the right end, the left end, and the ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... America. Although they are very rare, they are well executed."[201] The device of boring stone axes appears at the end of the stone age in the lake dwellings of Switzerland. Perhaps they were only decorative.[202] The Polynesians used stone axes which were polished but not bored or grooved, and the edge was not curved.[203] The Pacific islanders clung to the type of the adze, so that even when they got iron and steel implements from the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... scenes she was exquisitely pathetic, and displayed great depth of feeling. "Com' e bello" was rendered with thrilling tenderness, and the allegro which followed it created a furore; it was one of the most brilliant morceaux of florid decorative vocalism heard for years, the upper C in the cadenza being quite electrical. At the end of the first and second acts, the heartrending accents of a mother's agony, wrung from the depths of her soul, and the scornful courage tempered with malignant passion, ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... a passing emotion. It was too fine a morning for youth to grieve. At the distance the plumes of smoke made by the shells became decorative rather than deadly. From a crest he saw upon the plateau of Vicksburg and even discerned the dim outline of houses. Looking the other way, he saw the smoke of the iron-clads down the river, and he also caught glimpses of the Mississippi, ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is by way of being a poet, it seems, and he has sent her a little song, which we have translated, and I put it into rhyme, and the C.E.—who has a very decorative voice indeed—hums it to a lonesome little tune distantly related to ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... is not the ornamentation your friend objects to?[4] If it is, I would observe that there is no evidence of progress in the decorative and ornamental arts during the Ming Dynasty; and even in the Jesuit instruments that part of the work is purely Chinese, excepting in one instrument, which I am persuaded must have ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... windows looked out upon, stood perfectly straight and upright across the sky to the south of them a row of magnolias (grandiflora) at least sixty feet high, with their boles, as smooth as the beach, trimmed bare for two-thirds of their stature. The really decorative marks of the trimming had been so many years, so many decades, healed as to show that no harm had come of it or would come. The soaring, dark-green, glittering foliage stood out against the almost perpetually blue and white ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... painting and French decorative art was already in those days unfolding in Mrs. Pattison. Her drawing-room was French, sparely furnished with a few old girandoles and mirrors on its white paneled walls, and a Persian carpet with a black ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... electrical sub-stations and particularly in the passenger stations. It might readily have been supposed that the limited space and comparative uniformity of the underground stations would afford but little opportunity for architectural and decorative effects. The result has shown the ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... and tenderly and hesitatingly applied them to the work of illustrating his grand Ideal. These leaves and flowers were selected not for their own sake, though he felt them to be beautiful, but for the decorative motive they suggested, the humanity there was in them, and the harmony they had with the emergencies of his design. The design was not bent to accommodate them, but they were translated and lifted up into the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... incredulous; said you couldn't tell what was going on in the Department of the Interior. The Senator often uses a political reference to carry him over a delicate allusion. Flowering shrubs and bushes lined the path we climbed, silent in the sunshine, dustily decorative, and at the top the turning of a key let us into a strange place. Always a strange place, however often the guide-books beat their iterations upon it, a place that leaps at imagination, peering into other days through the mists that lie between, and blinds ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... cut off its gas and put away its eagle—when the two paviours, whom I take to form the entire paving population of the town, were ramming down the stones which had been pulled up for the erection of decorative poles—when the jailer had slammed his gate, and sulkily locked himself in with his charges. But then, as I paced the ring which marked the track of the departed hobby-horses on the market-place, pondering in my mind how long some hobby-horses do ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... dressed to advantage; in Sunday best, en grand tenue[Fr], en grande toilette[Fr]; in best bib and tucker, endimanche[Fr]. showy, flashy; gaudy &c. (vulgar) 851; garish, gairish|!; gorgeous. ornamental, decorative; becoming &c. (accordant) 23. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... would be left gasping, helpless and crippled; and of late years, not content with making it serviceable in every department of practical life, men have brought the shrub into the domain of aesthetics by using it for decorative purposes. ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... don't, mother, you know you don't care whether a picture's decorative or not; you don't care ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... engaged in these meditations when the maid handed her a small card, upon which was engraved the name, Leonard Grover. To conceal her agitation she threw a glance into the mirror and gave a few decorative touches to her person, before admitting the visitor. Then she put on her company smile and seated herself in a defensive attitude in the large, leather-covered easy-chair. She gave her hand graciously, without rising, to Grover ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... trunk, in unquestioning faith in the bureau that was to be part of the ranch equipment, took the "raw edge," as it were, off the desk. A bunch of prairie flowers, flaming cactus blossoms in scarlet and yellow, ox-eyed daisies, white clematis from the creek, seemed none the less decorative for the tin cup that held them. Mary grimly told herself that her school was to have refining influences, even if ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people everywhere became an evident social danger, and the government was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative work in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles, fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying wages to the younger adults for attendance at schools that would equip them to use the new atomic ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... Blouses are jauntier with matching Skirt; that Cricket | | Sweaters are "Sportsiest." | | | | The Sub-Deb Shop—understudies the "Deb" in outfitting | | the "Sub!" Are your years between 13 and 16—here are | | Sports Frocks; decorative Georgettes; bright cool Prints | | for a summer morning; pastel Chiffons or buoyant | | Taffetas for the evening party. And in Coats—there's | | the slim "wrappy", the Cape-back. | | | | When Youth ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... solitude. If he paused, however, she almost at the same time saw, it was because of his watching the approach, from the end of the sala, of one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were appointed for the party with the attendance of the others, always, as the most decorative, most sashed and starched, remained at the palace on the theory that she might whimsically want him—which she never, in her caged freedom, had yet done. Brown Pasquale, slipping in white shoes over the marble and suggesting to her perpetually charmed vision she could scarce say what, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... is, or should he, no decorative appanage, purchased late in the process of education, within the means of a few: but a quality, rather, which should, and can, condition all teaching, from a child's first lesson in Reading: that its unmistakable hall-mark can be impressed upon the earliest ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch |
